The Fox and the Crow: "That will do," said he. "That was all I wanted. In exchange for your cheese I will give you a piece of advice for the future: Do not trust flatterers." — I love the different language styles used by Aesop's animals. The fox, cunning and haughty, says "That will do," and uses phrases like "Good evening, Mistress Crow." So you can reveal a lot about a character just by the way he or she speaks—like Hagrid, in Harry Potter, who uses very broken (Scottish?) English.
In The Crow and the Pitcher, the author repeats the line, "Then he took another pebble and put it into the pitcher," five times. The monotony of the sentences parallels the monotonous and repetitious action of the crow, revealing the bird's patient tenacity through structure of sentences.
The Labourer and the Nightingale: At the end of this tale, a bird caught by a man flies away and tells him, "Don't believe a captive's promise, keep what you have, and don't mourn what is lost forever," because the man has just done all of these things in return for the bird's advice, essentially. But I love the feeling these words of wisdom leave with the reader at that realization—that the bird's captivity and his advice are coming full-circle, in a way... if that makes sense. I like it when authors tie everything together in the end of a story in a way that makes the reader go, "Oooo-oooh!"
(That "aha" moment depicted by this amazing drawing with a pretty interesting backstory)
At the beginning of The Cock and the Pearl, the author states, "A cock was once strutting up and down the farmyard among the hens when suddenly he espied something shinning amid the straw." This simple sentence is the "disturbance" of the story—the event that makes the reader wonder and makes the character change what he's doing.
—Which brings me to another point—all we know about the cock at this point is that he was walking around with the hens, and from there, we can pretty easily assume that that's something this rooster does all the time. Otherwise, spying something shiny in that area might not have seemed so strange. Aesop used animals to tell many fables, and I think part of the reason is because animals are simple, and don't require much "explanation." Everyone knows that roosters strut among hens, and that's basically all they do. He (or she?) uses animals that don't require complicated backstories because all you need to know about a character is what's important to the story. Sometimes it's hard not to get wrapped up in all the backstory of a great character you imagined, but it's important to remember to start the story with a disturbance and fill in tidbits of useful backstory later, but if it doesn't affect the story, your backstory is just wasted (and potentially boring) words.
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